A few months ago I was nosing around in settings, and saw Smart Shuffling. It was NOT checked, and when I read what it does, “Smart Shuffling prefers highly rated, popular, and less-recently heard tracks”, I got too focused on the “less-recently heard tracks”.
For the last few months, I’ve found myself spending too much time removing tracks from the queue, mostly popular music. There’s nothing wrong with popular music, but when that’s most of the queue, it stinks!
I just turned it off today. I’m hearing music I haven’t heard in a long time, and removing 1, maybe 2 songs from the queue.
I have been suspecting that I wasn’t hearing all of my music. Seemed to me I was hearing many of the same songs repeated. Some time ago I dug around and saw exactly what you saw. “less-recently heard tracks.” So I left it set to on. Today, knowing I wasn’t hearing all of my tracks over time, I modified the display to show how many times a track had been played. I found an astounding number of tracks that have never been played. I really don’t think it necessarily leans into highly rated or popular either. Frankly, I don’t think Smart Shuffling is very smart at all. I just turned it off, then headed here to the forum to see if it had been discussed. Thanks for sharing. I hope I have the same result as you and get to hear tracks that haven’t been played.
Well a couple of months have passed and I still have a surprising number of unplayed tracks. If I had some kind of control over the algorithm, I would always want the tracks played least to have highest priority. No matter what, the shuffle in either setting is unsatisfying and ignores a large number of tracks in my collection.
I have the same shuffle issue, and I believe it’s due to the resetting of the queue on many of the occasions I start Plex. Obviously, if I’ve recently used Plex, the queue stays where I left off and I can start again from there, but if I haven’t used it in awhile, the queue rebuilds a new queue. This is where I believe the problem is.
If the queue had a memory stored somewhere, so that it begins where it left off last time I was listening (unless I command it to build a new queue), it would eventually play all tracks in the selected Library.
There is a Plex “Features Suggestions” blog that is up above “General”. I’m gonna put this one in there.
Here’s my post in the Features Suggestions: "I’ve just been discussing a music shuffle issue with another user. It’s simply that the music queue resets and rebuilds a new queue if it hasn’t been used for some time, or the Plex app resets somehow (this happens quite often). The result is that many songs in a Library remain unplayed because the queue kind of starts over. It’s not that the songs are the same, it shuffles the songs, but it is still leaving many songs unplayed for months or longer. How ever the algorithm chooses the songs for shuffle, it doesn’t seem to care, for instance, that these songs haven’t been played in a year.
We both tried to use the Smart Shuffle feature, but we both agree that the Smart Shuffle feature is worse. It seems to have an affinity for popular music, and after a few months of frustratingly tedious queue deletions of pop music, we both turned it off, and were relieved at the new queues that were built. However, we both have many many songs that are never played.
If the shuffle queue had a memory stored somewhere, so that it begins where it left off last time I was listening (unless I command it to build a new queue), it would eventually play all tracks in the selected Library. Can that be done?"
Yo, CrashTest,
The links below explain a possible way to get Plex to play the old songs. It’s a bit complicated, but after a few tries I got it set up. You might want to give it a shot. If you have trouble let me know, maybe I can help. I’ll be trying it out over the next few weeks.
Here’s a link to the post I got in Features Suggestion:
Thank you for the Tip. I created a number of filtered playlists related to number of plays. Thank you so much for taking the time to share! Without this tip I would not have discovered this tool.
You’re welcome! I started listening today, right now actually, and it’s been really sweet to hear songs I haven’t heard in awhile. One thing that I’m doing differently is that I’m not deleting from the queue based on my mood. I’m moving songs up above the currently playing song, instead of delete them from the queue. I’m reserving the queue delete for songs that I actually don’t like, instead of songs that I’m just not in the mood for. That way, the ‘deleted’ filter doesn’t remove songs that I may be in the mood for next month, or whatever.
millhunk3, I thought I’d share what I’m doing to alleviate the issue of not wanting to hear songs in the shuffle that you don’t like, but not wanting to remove them from your library.
I have a FLAC library and a FLAC Favorites library. Everything in it’s original form is in FLAC. I copy almost every album (less Xmas albums, stuff that must be heard as an album, not singles, etc.) from FLAC into FLAC Favorites in its entirety so that PLEX gets the correct album info. If you put just a few songs, often times it doesn’t get the album info correct. I normalize everything that goes into FLAC Favorites because I have an enormous mix of old and new and new music production is always maximum loudness. That’s irritating when shuffling. Then I go thru the newly added album and remove the tracks I don’t really care for from FLAC Favorites. I still have the original album in FLAC complete and without normalization. My wife has a collection of MP3 files that all go into their own library and I just normalize them without a conscience. They are afterall, MP3s. A bunch of one hit wonder stuff that isn’t worth buying the album for a single song. I will say she rarely plays that MP3 library anymore having been exposed to the higher quality FLAC format.
Well, first off you gave me 2 things to lookup - I wasn’t aware of normalizing or FLAC. I don’t use FLAC, but I’m curious about it compared to WAV (lossless). It looks like the main difference is compression. At this time I don’t need compression. I have 2 NASs with 20TB RAID redundant, and I don’t access my Plex via remote over the internet. However, that may change and that’s why I’m curious about FLAC.
I don’t modify (normalize) any media that I rip up to my NAS. I have 2 identical Music libraries - one is MP3 and the other is WAV. The MP3s go on my phone which I use in the car (car noise makes the lower quality not noticeable), and the WAVs are for home. My music ranges mostly from the 50’s to the late 90’s, and I do notice a loudness variation between MP3 songs (yes, irritating), not so much with the WAVs. I have my entire music library on my phone in MP3s. I’m gonna look at my Switch file converter and see if it has normalizing for the MP3s.
At first I kind of did what you do, but a little different. I would rip albums up to the NAS, then move the songs I didn’t like into a folder called DeadCuts. But here’s the thing: I got bored with my favorite songs. So I combined the DeadCuts and Favorites into one library, and I was much happier. My playlists are primarily mood genre, and believe it or not, I think I needed bad songs in my playlists to appreciate the good songs. I think more is better even if it is junky. I often shuffle my entire library and frequently I’m surprised by a song that would’ve been a DeadCut…maybe it was the segue from the preceding song…I don’t know, but I enjoy my music more now and I listen to songs that I wouldn’t have listened to.
I got old ears so I can’t say there isn’t a difference between WAV and FLAC. I can tell the difference between those two and MP3 for sure. I use my FLAC library on Plex on my phone. Plex does the transcoding on the server so I don’t have to worry about the FLAC format being incompatible with the iPhone. I usually don’t use the phone in the car for music, but on my bike I’m always listening via Plex using the phone. The only reason to convert from WAV to FLAC would be if space becomes an issue. About the same era of music on my server but from the 60s to today for me. I’m kind of a loud listener at home (maybe too loud for some?). And if I’ve got it loud enough to satisfy me for something like Zeppelin, the volume will kick me out of the house when a track from something like Post Malone or Daft Punk comes on. I gotta normalize. So two libraries let’s me do that without corrupting the original. Great chat! Thanks again for your earlier tip on the actual subject of this topic.
Flac produces bit-identical output to WAV, once it is decoded in the client.
But it comes with the added bonus of requiring ~30% less storage space than WAV and the ability to store metadata which can be read by Plex.
Don’t use the various “normalizing” tools which are floating around. They don’t do any good in my experience.
If you use either Plexamp, Plex for Android/Android mobile, or Plex for iOS as your player, you can already use Loudness Leveling in Plex.
This requires that you are allowing your Plex server to perform the loudness analysis.
Thanks! I play the MP3s on my android in the car and that’s where the loudness variation seems the worst. I use a low end player I’ve had for a long time. I’ve never thought of using Plex player on my phone. Not sure how I would do that. Currently I have my entire music library on the phone in MP3 format so that it all fits( except the opera…I inherited tons of opera…one day I’ll listen to it). I’m gonna mess around with Plex player on the phone to see if it can play that MP3 library stored on the phone. Can I do that? Is the loudness leveling on Android automatic or is there a setting?
No, the Plex apps for the phone are pure Plex clients, which means they are accessing your Plex server by default.
It is also possible to “sync” a selection of artists, albums or playlists from your server to the phone. Format conversion from WAV/flac to OPUS is done on-the-fly in this case.
If you create some cleverly-constructed “smart playlists” and sync these, it is possbile to have a self-rotating/changing selection of music on your phone.
(OPUS is a lossy audio compression, which is several generations newer than mp3, so it provides better fidelity while requiring less storage space.)
I just did some research and it looks like OPUS and MP3 are about the same with regard to storage space, but OPUS has superior sound quality. Is that true? If so, I could sync my entire music library to the android, right? I would delete the existing MP3s to open up the space for the synced OPUS files.
Both methods can use various bitrates and hence resulting file sizes. But yes, if you keep the bitrate the same, OPUS will produce superior quality compared to mp3.
Keep in mind that the Plex app does not support syncing your whole library.
And you won’t get all Plex features with the synced media, because then the server is out of the game. But it is the server which enables many of the features.
